Propositions

Today is the first day of the Autumn '10 school year at Ohio State. I'm beginning my second year of my PhD program here at OSU. As per my coursework, I will spend my next twelve weeks thinking about the metaphysics of propositions (with Ben Caplan) and Frege's philosophy of language (with William Taschek). I'll also be sitting in (limitedly) on Lisa Shabel's seminar on Kant's first Critique and I'll be grading for Caplan's advanced metaphysics class, which will discuss basic topics like mereology, persistence, essence and change. In addition, I'll be thinking/writing a little bit about Love, Sex and Friendship, topics which I've recently been very interested in as an AOC, and I need to decompress concerning my work over the summer: I need to write some thoughts on Huw Price and his anti-representationalism. There, then, is a brief roadmap for the next twelve (or so) weeks.

I also made vegetarian sushi the other night, and it was glorious. I look forward to much more wonderful cooking in the next few months.

In preparation for the first meeting of my metaphysics seminar, I read Scott Soames contribution to the Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, titled simply "Propositions". Soames, who is one of the main writers we'll be engaging in this seminar, was helpful in setting the scene, and I thought I'd use this first post to re-hash some of the major points I took from Soames, in order to introduce the dialectic in which we'll be participating this fall. I am very new to this topic, so this should post should read as me trying out my sea legs, not me presenting myself as an expert that warrants being listened too.

Worlds that aren't the Actual World

In this post i'm going to give a cursory introduction to possible worlds talk as it is relevant to my project, so that I have something to refer back to when relevant.

So there's this world. Take the world to be everything. That is, everything there is. Worlds aren't planets, they're whole realms of being. So everything that you think of as true is true of this world. Now take one of those truths...for instance, Joe Biden is vice president. Now, you might want to say that the proposition expressed by the sentence "Joe Biden is vice president" has interesting properties besides being true. It also has the property of being contingent. That is, it didn't have to be true, and that's an interesting difference between the proposition expressed by "Joe Biden is vice president" and "all triangles are trilateral".

Martini Realism!

These metaphysical disputes, Hirsch points out, seem rather different from disputes about whether the Loch Ness monster exists, or whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are more like the dispute between the purist who says that only cocktails made of gin or vodka, dry vermouth, and perhaps an olive or two count as martinis, and the sorority girl who calls practically anything a martini as long as it served in the classic V-shaped glass. If these two are seated at a table on which such a glass contains some nonsense made of sour green apple liqueur, the latter will say that there is a martini there, and the former will deny it. This is a paradigm case of a verbal dispute. The disputants agree on all the facts, but disagree on how to use the word ‘martini’. (The purist is of course right about the use of the word. remember that there can be verbal disputes in which one side is straightforwardly mistaken!)

Karen Bennett "Composition, Colocality and Metaontology"

It's rare that a philosophical example is as revealing and insightful concerning the content of the example as they are concerning the philosophical concept that the example is wheeled in to elucidate.

Introducing Perspectives

So there's this world. There's some way the world is, just like there is some way your left leg is positioned right now. I'm sitting in a chair right now. That's one of the ways the world is.

There are sentences. Some of those sentences are true. It's plausible and intuitively appealing that the distinction between the sentences that are true and the sentences that are not true has something to do with the way the world is. It's an equally attractive thesis (though not equally plausible) that sentences are true when (and only when) the world is some way that matches the content of the sentence. For instance, my belief that there is a female philosopher is true because the world is built out of things, among them a philosopher that has the property of being female. In fact, you might think that all sentences are true (if they are true) in virtue of some corresponding bit of the world that makes them true. If you subscribe to the last thesis, you might espouse a correspondence theory of truth, according to which the world is full of truthmakers that suffice to make certain sentences true. Sentences, in turn, represent the world as being a certain way, and the true sentences are the ones that represent the world as containing their a truthmakers that the world does, indeed, contain.

Fates of Au Pairs: Party Duelers Instantiating Unicycles

This summer I will be reading Truth and Truthmakers with a friend, and in preparation I'm giving a quick read to A World of States of Affairs. Armstrong is developing a sustained account of states of affairs, and a defense of the thesis that they are the building blocks of what is.